Fringe: Changing Context of the Urban Peripheral and ‘Near-Rural’ Areas in a Process of Stability and Degrowth

Abstract

The dominance of the growth-based theories over the planning literature and implications has once seemed to be unyielding and indomitable. For decades, growth has overwhelmingly been on the focal point of development strategies influencing both economic and spatial interventions in a wider range from national and regional level policies to land use planning. This picture, however, is itself receding in the past. Demographic structure changes having begun to be much more apparent especially after the 2000s in many countries represent a real challenge to almost all of the urban growth-based strategies. These demographic structure changes seem to lead at least two vital questions. The first question deals with the need to find new strategies for efficient, suitable and so also ‘smart’ ways to entrench a certain level of economic success with possible near future labor market bottlenecks and without the existence of fast urbanization and rapid urban growth. The second question seems to be about the main ‘problem’ of the planning profession. The existence of population stability – or even decline – intertwined with the absence of rapid urban growth paves the way for taking quality-based problems into the focal point of planning instead of growth-based ones. The attention of the literature in relation to these two questions is directed toward new strategies which attempt to cope with controlling the economic consequences on the one hand and seeking problem-based planning processes focused on qualitative issues of urban areas rather than just intending to manage growth problems on the other. In tune with this tendency in the literature, this study aims preliminarily at asking a third question having regard to the formerly identified two questions. This question takes urban peripheral areas wherein the ‘urban’ touches the ‘rural’, and near-rural areas wherein the accessibility to the amenities of urban life qualities and the proximity to the regional towns are minimally influenced by the friction of distance into consideration. This study aims secondly at contributing to the conceptual framework of urban fringe studies. To anticipate the direction, two major new industrial districts of Turkey, Gaziantep and Kayseri are examined in this research.